Brock Yates Quotes

Quotes about:

Cars Nascar Racing Reality Running Style

I admit to wasting my life messing around with fast cars and motorcycles.

Brock Yates

Car, Motorcycle, Fast Car

48 Copy quote
Why the hell not run a race across the United States? A balls-out, shoot-the-moon, f***-the-establishment rumble from New York to Los Angeles to prove what we had been harping about for years, for example, that good drivers in good automobiles could employ the American Interstate system the same way the Germans were using their Autobahns? Yes, make high-speed travel by car a reality! Truth and justice affirmed by an overtly illegal act.

Brock Yates

Running, New York, Moon

10 Copy quote
I have spent--or wasted--my life around motor racing: driving, promoting, and writing about what Ernest Hemingway once linked with mountain climbing and bull fighting as the only true sports. The rest, he sniffed, are merely games.

Brock Yates

Sports, Writing, Fighting

9 Copy quote
As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. But only when the reality has not been subsumed by foamy legends and fantasies that radiate outward from the actual event.

Brock Yates

Truth, Reality, Events

9 Copy quote
Racing is bulging at the seams with pure nutball characters, men who can drink more, screw more, fight more, laugh more, joke more, than practically any collection of people in the world.

Brock Yates

Character, Fighting, Men

Brock Yates (2004). “NASCAR Off the Record”, p.169, MotorBooks International

7 Copy quote
While greenies and their media flunkies continue to savage the gasoline-powered internal-combustion engine and rhapsodize about hybrids, hydrogen, electrics, natural gas, propane, nuclear, and God-knows-what-other panaceas, perhaps including bovine urine, there are no realistic, economically viable alternatives. None. Zero. Like it or not, as long as we remain dependent on the private automobile for transportation (roughly 80 percent of all movement in the nation is by car), we are harnessed to the IC gas engine.

Brock Yates

Zero, Media, Car

4 Copy quote
I realize this is blasphemy, but a few weeks ago I tried to watch a NASCAR race being run at Talladega. I lasted about five minutes before terminal boredom overtook me. It appeared to be nothing more than a high-speed freeway commute--a mob of luridly painted, identical lumps of metal loping at 180 mph around the banking, fender to fender, nose to tail. Knowing the scenario would surely devolve into a multicar demolition derby that would thrill the goobers in the grandstands, I turned off the set to later learn that this time it was Jimmie Johnson who triggered the eight-car melee.

Brock Yates

Running, Eight, Race

8 Copy quote
Unlike conventional jocks, who tend to sell aluminum siding and give canned speeches to parochial-school athletic banquets in the off-season, race drivers never shuck their image when they leave the stadium. They are supposed to be zany, nomadic soldiers of fortune who are involved in wild endeavors during every waking moment.

Brock Yates

School, Race, Giving

7 Copy quote
At Car and Driver, we were convinced that the automobile, as we knew and loved it, was as dead as the passenger pigeon. Ralph Nader was at full cry, ringing his tocsin of automobile doom into the brains of the public, convincing them that the lump of chrome and iron in the driveway was as lethal as a dose of Strontium 90 or a blast from a Viet Cong AK-47.

Brock Yates

Ak 47, Iron, Car

4 Copy quote
More books, more racing and more foolishness with cars and motorcycles are in the works.

Brock Yates

Book, Car, Racing

7 Copy quote
There was a day when you could identify a NASCAR Ford, Chevrolet, or Dodge and they actually looked like "stock cars." Now they are pod machines, slick on the outside but still powered by the same Neanderthal carbureted pushrod V-8s that have been under their hoods for half a century. If this is real auto racing, then the WWF ought to be part of the Olympics.

Brock Yates

Real, Car, Racing

5 Copy quote
The early 1970s was a time when illegal acts were in style. Everybody was going nuts with causes, most of them against the law.

Brock Yates

Law, Nuts, Style

Brock Yates (2003). “Cannonball!”, p.13, MotorBooks International

4 Copy quote
Had I been more responsible I might have made something of myself as a junk bond trader, long-haul trucker or perhaps a plumbing contractor.

Brock Yates

Ties, Long, Junk

8 Copy quote
The bicycle is a former child's toy that has now been elevated to icon status because, presumably, it can move the human form from pillar to post without damage to the environment.

Brock Yates

Children, Moving, Icons

8 Copy quote
Some guy once told me that skydiving is like cutting your throat and seeing if you can get to the doctor before you bleed to death.

Brock Yates

Cutting, Doctors, Guy

13 Copy quote
They still talk about the night that Augie Pabst, a fresh-faced heir to the brewing fortune, drove a rented Falcon into the swimming pool of the Mark Thomas Inn in Monterey, California. His reviews were so good that he repeated the act at a Howard Johnson's outside Denver.

Brock Yates

Swimming, Night, California

6 Copy quote
Don't get me wrong, I think bikes are terrific. I own several of my own, including a trendy mountain style, and ride them for pleasure and light exercise.

Brock Yates

Fitness, Exercise, Thinking

10 Copy quote
If the numbers mean anything, they tell us that vastly more life is left in the reviled internal-combustion engine than any of the blue-state lefties could imagine. First, that madman Bush wins, and now this news. How depressing.

Brock Yates

Depressing, Mean, Winning

4 Copy quote
The automobile, both a cause and an effect of this decentralization, is ideally suited for our vast landscape and our generally confused and contrary commuting patterns.

Brock Yates

Confused, Confusion, Car

91 Copy quote
Some critics of racing witlessly claim that spectators only attend to see someone die. This is utter and complete nonsense. I have been at numerous races where death is present. When a driver dies, the crowd symbolically dies, too. They come to see action at the brink: ultimate risk taking and the display of skill and bravery embodied in the sport's immortals like Nuvolari, Foyt, and thousands of others who operate at the ragged edge.

Brock Yates

Sports, Race, Skills

7 Copy quote
The appeal of the Riverside 500 was based on that overall spectacle of witnessing a mob of brightly colored, bellowing automobiles gamboling over the countryside like a herd of runaway steers. Stock car roadracing is in fact like a mechanical stampede, and we personally think it's maybe the neatest form of motor racing known to man. It's definitely the greatest spectacle in roadracing.

Brock Yates

Men, Thinking, Motor Racing

Brock Yates (2004). “NASCAR Off the Record”, p.102, MotorBooks International

6 Copy quote
Will a day come when our cars have carbon-fiber tubs, 18,000-rpm V-10 engines, and ground-effects tunnels? Perhaps, about the same time we have condos on the moon.

Brock Yates

Moon, Tunnels, Car

4 Copy quote
If any vestige of the American automobile industry is to survive, it must involve state-of-the-art vehicles that are not equal to but surpass the best imports in every way.

Brock Yates

Art, Way, States

9 Copy quote
To be sure, [NASCAR] stars were initially ex-bootleggers for the most part drawn from that talent pool in the Carolinas hills: "good ol' boys" as they referred to themselves. That's exactly how they would be described in the press that slowly became enamored with their raucous life style. That has all changed, with the drivers of today polished and clean-cut athletes who are expected to behave like commercial puppets in public.

Brock Yates

Stars, Athlete, Cutting

9 Copy quote
Everything at a NASCAR event carries a corporate logo except the lavatory stalls.

Brock Yates

Events, Logos, Nascar

4 Copy quote

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Born: October 21, 1933
Died: October 5, 2016
Occupation: Journalist
Cite this Page: Citation

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